Talk:Paul Tillich

Page archived

page archived if only to provide a moment's peace from the relentless screeds. saul tillich, why not just start a freaking blog somewhere. you aren't interested in writing an encyclopedia, you're interested in promulgating your views. that's just what blogs are for. they're great! even i have one! Anastrophe (talk) 04:00, 11 March 2008 (UTC)

That isn't archiving, it's censorship. Had archiving been your real objective, you might have archived material more than a month old. Instead, you deleted -- that's what you really did -- fresh material with which you disagreed. I posted the commentary you call a "screed" at 2:22 on March 11; you deleted it less that two hours later at 04:00. And your use of the epithet "screed" demonstrates that you knew exactly what you were doing, and why.

You are free to delete ("edit mercilessly") material in the Tillich article. You are not authorized to delete the opinions and arguments of contributors to the Talk page. You yourself complained vigorously when, in quoting you for purposes of refutation, I corrected a typo of yours by capitalizing the first word of a sentence. So please quit censoring.Saul Tillich (talk) 00:27, 13 March 2008 (UTC)

Jonalexdeval's Comments on Theism

Jonalexdeval wrote: “What it comes down to is this. Tillich applied the word "theist" to himself, therefore the main body of the article must follow that line of thought. Anything else is part of "Tillich criticism". What you are failing to understand is that the issue of such labels is not fundamentally important. Why? Because the article should simply describe Tillich's thought without recourse to oversimplifications, labels that have pre-packaged connotations. The whole point of Tillich's thought (and that of most serious thinkers) is to get beyond such inadequate distinctions, so reverting back to them in order to describe his thought would be pointless and counterproductive.” Jonalexdeval (talk) 11:04, 8 March 2008 (UTC)

The truth is quite the opposite: Tillich explicitly repudiated “the God of theism” and called for allegiance to “the God above the God of theism.” He repeatedly and consistently attacked the God of theism and denied that he was a theist in the sense of one who believes in the God of theism. Therefore, the article must follow the “God above the God of theism” line of thought. Consider the following:

• In The Courage to Be, Tillich disavowed the God of theism, describing it as “a being beside others and as such a part of the whole of reality,” and he called this God an “invincible tyrant” (Tillich, 1952, p. 185). Tillich then called for allegiance to a higher God, “the God above the God of theism” (ibid., 182-90). The higher God has roots going back to a 1915 pamphlet of Tillich’s that referred to “the God above God” (Hopper, 1967, p. 28).
• Elaborating, Tillich said the God of theism is “the deepest root of atheism, . . . an atheism which is justified as the reaction against theological theism” (Tillich, 1952, p. 185).
• Tillich also wrote that “atheism is the right religious and theological reply” to the concept of “the existence of God” (Tillich, 1951, p.45).
• Similarly, he wrote that “atheism a correct response to the ‘objectively’ existing God of literalistic thought” (Tillich, 1966b, p. 65). “Objectively” is Hegelian terminology (“object”) describing anything in the universe other than the thinker or observer (the “subject”). In other words, an “objective” God is an entity apart from man; man is not part of this God.
• Although Tillich denied that he was an atheist, his denial rested on his redefinition of atheism: redefined as disbelief in “the God above the God of theism.” He wrote: “Not the unbeliever [in the God of theism], but rather the believer . . . is the real atheist,” and he described “genuine theism” as “affirmation of God as the Unconditional” (Tillich, 1969, p. 79), where “the Unconditional” is an alternate name for Tillich’s “God above God.” Walter Kaufmann observed that, in Tillich’s words, atheism “can only mean the attempt to remove any ultimate concern – to remain unconcerned about the meaning of one’s existence.” This redefinition inspires Kaufmann’s wry comment that “it turns out that . . .such avowed atheists as Freud and Nietzsche aren’t atheists at all” (Kaufmann, 1961a, pp. 133-34).
• Whatever else “God” implies, the Judeo-Christian God has always been regarded as a benevolent, omniscient supernatural being. But Tillich says God is “not a being” (Tillich, 1951, p. 237) and that “no divine being exists” (Tillich, 1957b, p. 47).
• Whereas the Judeo-Christian God is a SUPERNATURAL being, Tillich repudiated “all” supernaturalism when he called attention to “something . . . that is fundamental to all my thinking – the antisupernaturalistic attitude” (Tillich, 1965, p. 158). Tillich’s God is therefore nonsupernatural, not the God of theism.
• “God” is one of many Christian concepts Tillich has converted to “symbols” by giving them new, nonliteral, nonsupernaturalistic meanings: “God is the basic and universal SYMBOL for what concerns us ultimately. . . . Therefore it cannot be used in its literal sense. To say anything about God in the literal sense of the words used is to say something false about Him. [‘Him’ is another symbol.] The symbolic . . . is the only true way of speaking about God” (Tillich, 1954a, p. 109). You fail to recognize that Tillich’s statements about God that you take literally actually have nonliteral, or symbolic, meanings.

Against this background, I challenge you to produce the quotation where you claim “Tillich applied the word ‘theist’ to himself.” Let’s see the quotation (if it even exists) in full context, with at least two preceding and two following sentences. And say why you conclude he is referring to belief in the God of theism rather than “belief” in the God above the God of theism.

Another point: You say words like theism, deism, pantheism, atheism, and God are just “labels” and, as such, oversimplifications. Then, having yourself labeled Tillich a “theist” (!), you say the article should describe Tillich the way you have described him – as a theist who believed that God/Logos became flesh – but without recourse to “labels” (except for God and other labels you yourself use). What you disparagingly call labels, however, are actually words with generally accepted and well understood meanings. Without words we cannot communicate.

Moreover, what you call labels are rarely “oversimplifications.” Their meanings are clear. Take “theism.” The Routledge Concise Encyclopedia of Western Philosophy says “theism is the belief that [1] there is a God and that God is [2] omnipotent, [3] omniscient, and [4] benevolent, [5] distinct from the universe [i.e., not pantheistic] which [6] he has created and [7] in which he intervenes.” You can find similar definitions of theism in any dictionary. (Take away [4] and [7] and you have deism; also take away [2], [3], [5], and [6], then add [8] man participates in – is part of – God, and you have pantheism.) Tillich has repeatedly rejected the God of theism.

One label that you use, “God,” does oversimplify when used in the context of a discussion of Tillich’s thought, because here the word is ambiguous. Most of the time “God” does not mean what it ordinarily means. Yet you use “God” without qualification and without bothering to explain that Tillich generally uses the word symbolically, that is, in a nonliteral sense: “To say anything about God in the literal sense of the words used is to say something false about Him. The symbolic . . . is the only true way of speaking about God” (Tillich, 1954a, p. 109). You also fail to mention that Tillich does not believe in the conventional God of theism.

Again, you use the labels “estrangement,” “apologetic,” “logos,” “Jesus as the Christ,” and “Christian message” without either clarifying what you think they mean and without your having any understanding of what they mean to Tillich. “Estrangement,” for example is a Hegelian term (selbstenfremdung in German), that really means self-estrangement and refers to a person’s failure to recognize as himself the other things or persons in his “universe” (a general category the observer belongs to). The issues here are not what words or “labels” we use but (a) what Tillich means by God, whose definition must be understood for the reader to understand anything else about Tillich’s thought, and (b) whether Tillich is a theist, a metaphysician/pantheist, a nontheistic mystic, or an atheist. (Nobody considers him a deist.)

Tillich Article’s Section on Theology

The article’s “Theology” section pretends to explain, but the principal author, Jonalexdeval, is merely paraphrasing statements he himself doesn’t understand. At the same time, in referring to “the norm,” which is “Jesus as the Christ,” the author misleads his readers in four ways:

• By failing to say that Tillich, in many places, said he did not believe in the divinity of Jesus, the author creates the false impression that Tillich regarded Jesus as a divine savior. (Tillich didn’t believe in souls, life after death, the virgin birth, or Jesus’s resurrection either).
• The author also fails to say that Tillich uses the phrase “as the Christ” to differentiate between the supernatural Christ of mythology and the real historical Jesus of Nazareth.
• The author fails again to say that Tillich created his “norm” in order to create a theology that would not crumble if, some time in the future, evidence emerged that the historical Jesus never existed. The Christ of what Tillich regards as mythology would still exist (as a myth) and would have the crucial characteristic Tillich bases his concept of God on.
• As the biggest failure of all, the author ignores Tillich’s careful explanation of why “Jesus as the Christ” is the norm. Tillich’s reason is that, according to the Council of Nicaea, the Christ was not half God and half man but “fully God and fully man.” The norm calls for a God that is “fully God and fully man.”

As the article now stands, it is mostly unintelligible gibberish, meaningless abstraction. Take this pair of sentences: “It is important to remember that, for Tillich, no formulation of the question [a question that the method of correlation answers] can contradict the theological answer. This is because the Christian message claims, a priori, that the logos ‘who became flesh’ is also the universal logos of the Greeks.” Don’t you see the non sequitur in the word "because"? How does either (a) identifying the Greek Logos with God or (b) having God become incarnated as a man make it impossible for a question to contradict a theological answer, assuming contradiction really is impossible? Taken literally, those are two unrelated assertions. The author is claiming, thoughtlessly and without comprehension (just paraphrasing what either McKelway or Tillich said), that if God is not or was not also the Logos, or else was not incarnated, a question COULD contradict the theological answer.

The author pretends to explain but clearly doesn’t understand what Tillich means in the two sentences, taken from another source, that he paraphrases. He is taking the words literally, whereas they have no literal meaning. What does it mean for a question to contradict its answer? How does God’s being the Logos prevent such contradiction? Taken literally, the words are unadulterated nonsense. Tillich is using his private symbolic language.

To those who understand this symbolic language, the sentences do make sense. But I challenge the author (and his friends) to explain, by giving a nontheological example of a Q and its A, (1) what it means for a question to “contradict” its answer and (2) how, if “the Logos became flesh” (Jn. 1:14), does it become impossible for a philosophical question to contradict its theological answer. Not even the author can explain either (1) or (2), and almost certainly no reader can either; so what we have is nonsense, gibberish. (Only those who know what “question” and “answer” symbolize, what “contradict” means in this context, and why “Jesus as the Christ” must be “the norm,” can turn nonsense into sense.)Saul Tillich (talk) 00:41, 13 March 2008 (UTC)